Earthfall Page 0,32
he also loved their way of life. True, they were confined indoors, but as far as Zdorab was concerned, outdoor life was over-rated. He did not miss insects. He did not miss excessive heat and cold, humidity and dryness. He did not miss the defecations of animals and the smells of strange things cooking or overfamiliar things rotting.
But it wasn't the absence of annoyances that made him relish the life aboard ship. It was the positive things. A comfortable bed every night. Daily bathing in a shower of clean water. A life centered around the library, around learning and teaching. Computers that could play as well as work. Music perfectly reproduced. Toilets that cleaned themselves and had no odors. Clothing that could be cleaned without laundering. Meals prepared in moments. And all of it while traveling at some unfathomable speed on a hundred-year voyage to another star.
He tried explaining it to Nafai, but the young man merely looked at Zdorab in puzzlement and said, "But what about trees?" Obviously Nafai couldn't wait to get to the new planet, which would no doubt be another place with lots of dirt and bugs and plenty of sweaty manual labor to do. Zdorab had played obsequious servant all the way across the desert; he loved the fact that in this starship there were no servants, because all work was either done by machines and computers or was so simple and easy that anyone could do it-and everyone did.
And he loved teaching the children. Some of them were barely children anymore, six years into the voyage. Oykib had shot up to nearly two meters now, at the apparent age of fourteen. He was lanky, but Zdorab had seen him working out in the centrifuge and his body was wiry with hard tight muscles. Zdorab knew he was middle-aged by the fact that he could see that beautiful young body and feel only the memory of desire. If there was any mercy in nature, it was the fading of the male libido with middle age. Some men, feeling the slackening of desire, went to heroic-or criminal- lengths to get the illusi0n of renewed sexual vigor. But for Zdorab it was a relief. It was better to think of Oykib and his even-more-beautiful younger brother, Yasai, as students. As friends of his son, Padarok. As potential mates of his daughter, Dabrota.
My son, he thought. My daughter. Good Lord. Who would ever have guessed, during his years in clandestine love affairs in the men's city outside Basilica, that I would ever have a son and a daughter. And if any man laid hands on either one of them without my consent, I think I'd kill him.
And then he thought: I'm a jungle creature after all.
He was going to sleep again today, as Shedemei wakened to take his place. They would overlap for a few hours-the Oversoul said there was life support enough for that-and it would be good to see her. She was his best friend, the only one who knew his secrets, his inward struggles. He could tell her almost everything.
But he could not tell her about the little program he had set up in a life support computer, one of those not directly part of the Oversoul's memory. Just before scheduling the one wake-up call for midvoyage, the obvious one that the Oversoul had detected at once, Zdorab had written a program that ostensibly took a harmless inventory of supplies. It also checked, however, to see if it was exactly six and a half years into the voyage, and if it was, it would send a new version of the schedule file to the computer where the calendar was executed. The new version would call for Elemak, Zdorab, and Shedemei to be wakened thirty seconds later; then, after another second, the original copy of the schedule would be restored and the inventory program would rewrite itself to eliminate the extra subroutine. It was all very deft and Zdorab was proud of its cleverness.
He also knew that it was potentially lethal to the peace of the community and he kept intending, now that he was taking part in Nafai's little plan, to get into the life support computer and eliminate it before it could go off. The trouble was that it was not as easy to get access to that computer, now that they were in flight. He had duties, and when those were done, the children were everywhere all the time and they would be